


If You Have To

by sternfleck



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 5 + 1 Fic, 5 Times, Angst with a Happy Ending, Kylo Ren Has Feelings, M/M, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Starkiller Base Rescue, Starkiller speech, benarmie, canon-typical war crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26388370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternfleck/pseuds/sternfleck
Summary: As the Starkiller weapon fires, Kylo Ren looks back at Ben Solo's memories of a childhood spent on Hosnian Prime.Five memories for five planets.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 17
Kudos: 28
Collections: Classic Kylux Throwback 2020





	If You Have To

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story back in March. This was actually the first Kylux fanfic I ever completed, but at the time, I thought it was too soft to post. Joke's on me—now I only write soft Kylux.
> 
> The title is TLJ-era, obviously, but everything else is Pure Classic Kylux, so I decided to submit this for the event.
> 
> Kylo may have been born on Chandrila, but I have a headcanon that he spent his early years on Hosnian Prime, and I’ll never give it up. This fic is an exploration of that idea.

_“We only live, only suspire_  
_Consumed by either fire or fire.”_  
_-T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”_

-

On Hosnian Prime lives a dark-haired boy. A stranger. He races through the grass of the floating park on childish legs. Stumbles. Catches himself on his hands and pops up from the grass, laughing.

Kylo Ren can look into the past and see him, even from where he stands on the bridge of a starship half a Galaxy away.

The boy runs fast enough to catch up to the Wookiee ahead of him. The creature swings him up into its hairy arms and roars, a roar that means laughter and warmth and friendly love.

The trees are in bloom all over the park, shedding fragrant purple petals across the green grass. A petal catches in the boy’s hair, above one of his prominent ears. With unexpected gentleness, the Wookiee brushes it away.

Then a light comes from the sky. No one looks up to witness it.

The light rushes, roars forth with a force beyond human senses. It’s a light that fills the world, and tears the scene apart, turns it all to stellar fire, until the dark-haired boy is gone, and casts no shadow.

Kylo Ren’s breath catches somewhere deep inside his mask. He hears the word quintupled, echoing around him: _fire_.

-

On Hosnian Prime a woman and a man are in love with each other. They hold their son between them, marvelling. Their awe needs no words; it passes between them like breath.

They have lived through war, lost nearly everything they ever loved, and still, in spite of their grief, they created this boy, together. This small rambunctious perfect life. These wide eyes hungry to learn the world. This fluttering heart, these sticky hands, this sweet mouth that asks question after question, and says no to all their answers.

The woman tucks her hand into her boy’s dark curls. He presses against her, loving her and knowing nothing but love. Then she fixes her brown eyes upon her boy’s father, and, with a wordless invitation, coaxes a kiss from the man’s smiling lips.

The light from the sky is here, too. Fatal, it swells and grows. The beam of it splinters into a wave of fire that crashes down upon the little family and—it’s as though they never existed.

-

Kylo Ren stands far across fathomless space, at the other end of the beam of light. He is at home here in his ship above this cold world, in the only home he has ever truly wanted.

There is a voice here that speaks bold words, words that mean the end of all things. Kylo Ren reaches for that voice, and longs to live and die inside its fiery promises.

-

On Hosnian Prime a teacher arrives from another planet, to show off feats of ancient magic. He has bright blue eyes that sparkle as he plays tricks to make the children laugh. The teacher is not old, but he’s wise, steady, self-contained, light of heart. He pulls the children’s toys through the air like puppets, and makes the dolls act out stories from long ago, stories of knights and princesses, stories of the light and the dark.

A boy with dark hair and big ears sits in the front row, scowling at the teacher, his uncle. The boy lifts his hand. His dark eyes shine. He flicks his wrist, and a figurine of a knight stands upright where it has fallen on the floor. It drifts up through the air, light as a mote of dust.

The teacher’s eyes widen. His mouth curves into a crow of astonished praise. But the boy draws his hand across the air in a slash like a blade. The toy knight careens through the rest of the floating puppet show and knocks the other figures to the ground.

The light that blasts out of the sky makes a mockery of childish destruction. It is terrible and whole, this light, and in seconds it devours everything. It is starlight, the light that gives life to all things in the Galaxy, and it is this light that takes all life away from Hosnian Prime and leaves wild dusty darkness in its place.

-

Kylo Ren feels this light in his chest like a love without precedent or parallel. It swells in him and horrifies him, and it feels like emptiness and like admiration. All that this light takes from him, he gives to it willingly. He gives it all to the young sharp voice that says _fire_ , and _the end_ , and other words, too.

In private, this voice is full of pleading, secret, tender words meant only for Kylo Ren. These hidden words, too, set fires. 

-

On Hosnian Prime a padawan is smashing up his room. The lightsaber stains the scene with its blue glow as it burns with a ringing hiss through a chair, a bureau, a wardrobe, a pile of books. The bedroom walls are smoking, slashed with dark glyphs in a language of helpless rage.

He’s alone. He left the Jedi Temple with his Master’s permission, took a ship all the way back to Hosnian Prime to celebrate the Festival of Liberation with his parents. But the padawan’s mother has a suite of political appearances that can’t be avoided, and his father is off wrangling some smugglers’ deal in the Outer Rim. The padawan is alone, and the more he destroys with his lightsaber, the more his loneliness grows.

The light in the sky is like the thin light from his saber at first, until it crashes into the planet in a thunderous blow. In a thoughtless instant, the light erases the padawan completely. It erases his pain, his sorrow, his wrath. It subsumes his wrecked room into a wide, boundless breadth of destruction.

The padawan willingly surrenders to the violence of it.

-

Kylo Ren’s face is wet behind his mask. Anyone who saw him here on the bridge could assign any mood to his blank helmet, his guarded pose.

From inside the mask, the blaze of fractured light in space seems so far away that Kylo could take it in one hand and offer it up to a lover, precious as a jewel.

-

On Hosnian Prime a delegation from the Unknown Regions pays a visit to a Senator of the Republic.

The Senator’s son would rather be anywhere else than in these grand halls and these itchy robes, which are clean and formal and all wrong for him. His braid tickles the skin of his neck like an insect’s feet.

There is another boy in the delegation. He stares at the Senator’s son across the room with pale eyes cold enough to hurt. He wears a uniform, as though he’s already a man, and his neat hair is the colour of fire.

“You hate it here,” the boy from the Unknown Regions says to the Senator’s son that night, as they stand together on the balcony overlooking the city’s glittering depths. He says it as though he’s the one who can read minds.

The Senator’s son leans against the railing with his shoulders hunched. “You hate it too,” he counters. “I can feel your disapproval in the Force.”

The boy from the Unknown Regions sighs. It’s a man’s sigh, not a boy’s, and for a moment the Senator’s son is half-ashamed to impose on the older boy’s plans for the evening. Surely a visitor from the Unknown Regions must be eager to explore all the variety and luxury a Core planet has to offer, in rowdy style.

Then the boy from the Unknown Regions, his eyes fixed on the starry horizon, begins to speak. His voice is high and strong and certain.

“People are starving across the Galaxy. Dying of preventable diseases, being murdered in pointless skirmishes that settle nothing. Outside the gravity of this system’s sun, everything lies in chaos. The decadent Republic cares nothing for the rest of us. As long as there are luxuries and diversions for the highest officials on the Core Worlds, the rest of the Galaxy can rot in ruin. It’s a convenient enterprise for those in power. It’s a crime against everyone else.”

The boy from the Unknown Regions finishes his speech with a quavering breath. He’s standing close to the Senator’s son, with his delicate hands clasped together at the small of his back. Their shoulders nearly brush together.

The Senator’s son looks up at him, his too-big mouth slightly open.

“I don’t hate this planet,” the boy from the Unknown Regions adds after a moment. He tears his gaze away from the gleaming city to look the Senator’s son in the face. “I hate what the Republic stands for. This opulence is built on exploitation.”

The Senator’s son’s throat bobs as he swallows. The fierceness on the other boy’s thin face scares him.

He wants to fall into that fierceness and fear it forever.

The boy from the Unknown Regions is taller, but if the Senator’s son were brave enough, he could use the Force to lift himself easily to the older boy’s mouth. The Senator’s son could kiss all those forbidden truths away from the older boy’s lips and take them into his heart. He could make himself into more than a Senator’s son.

He doesn’t kiss the boy from the Unknown Regions. He imagines it, though. Could he taste that soft, bitter mouth until he learned his own destiny? It would be something they would build together, the two of them, out of their grand and terrible plans.

The boy from the Unknown Regions smiles down at the Senator’s son, and his cold eyes are softer now as he takes in the younger boy’s upturned face.

The Senator’s son can hear his thoughts. The boy from the Unknown Regions is remembering what it was like to be younger. He hopes, if he’s fortunate, to one day be old.

Mostly, he hopes to leave nothing in the Galaxy unmarked by the fire of his convictions. Everything else is optional.

When the annihilating light sears across the Hosnian sky at last, the Senator’s son sits facing the delegation from the Unknown Regions. He watches through the skyscraper’s transparisteel walls as the beam descends out of the morning blue. It opens into a fiery tide that casts the flame-haired boy in darkness, makes an elegant silhouette of the Grand Admiral in her uniform beside him.

Then the light is upon them. It eats the city whole. The Senator’s son is gone in a flash, along with all the people of the decadent New Republic.

The boy with the bright hair and cold eyes disappears into that wild storm of starfire, too, and it almost hurts to let the memory of him go.

-

It’s night.

Kylo Ren has lost nearly a life’s worth of blood into Starkiller’s snows. The face above him wavers, red-gold and pale, less solid than a vision in the Force.

General Hux kneels beside him, pulls him into his arms. In his high, strong, certain voice, he says, “Ren, it’s all over. The planet is collapsing. It’s turning into a star. It’s all fire. Ren, come with me, up now, Ren, please, _please_.”

This is how it will always end, Kylo realises. The rolling surge of fire that eats through each planet he inhabits. The memories dissolving under him like snow.

At the bottom of it all, underneath the destruction Kylo Ren will abet and embody in his every lifetime, there will be the enduring brightness of this person who holds Kylo now in his arms.

Kylo lets himself be held and lifted. Here is his home, beyond the fiery end of these many worlds he's left behind.

His home, impossibly, is this man who throws his words at Kylo to taunt him and set him alight. This rival who acts as though he can’t feel the longing between them even when their bodies are pressed together, but whose deeper mind is, nevertheless, wreathed always in soft thoughts of victory and union.

His home. His salvation among ruins. This fearsome soldier who speaks, in all ways, day and night, of _fire, fire, fire._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as always, to [surrenderer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/surrenderer/pseuds/surrenderer), for telling me several times to post this, even though I ignored you about it all summer. I listened, in the end!
> 
> And thanks to all Kyluxers for welcoming me to the fandom four years late. You’re all the best.
> 
> Find me and follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sternfleck) and on [tumblr](https://sternfleck.tumblr.com/).


End file.
